


The Midnight Hours

by MelyndaR



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Antisemitism, F/M, Gen, brief discussions of
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-07
Updated: 2018-03-06
Packaged: 2019-03-28 02:18:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 7,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13894152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MelyndaR/pseuds/MelyndaR
Summary: No one ever talked about the midnight hours.Somehow, it had become an unspoken rule in Howard Stark’s LA mansion – and maybe it always had been one in the first place, before the number of residents expanded and Howard had to turn down an offer from an LA producer to turn their life into a daytime comedy. No one ever talked about what happened during the midnight hours, mostly because they didn’t want to acknowledge it themselves.





	1. Chapter 1

_Are you not aware that there comes a midnight hour when everyone must unmask? ~ Soren Kierkegaard_

_Sometimes there is no darker place than our own thoughts; the moonless midnight of the mind. ~ Dean Kootz_

* * *

No one ever talked about the midnight hours.

Somehow, it had become an unspoken rule in Howard Stark’s LA mansion – and maybe it always had been one in the first place, before the number of residents expanded and Howard had to turn down an offer from an LA producer to turn their life into a daytime comedy. No one ever talked about what happened during the midnight hours, mostly because they didn’t want to acknowledge it themselves.

During the _day_ , under the burning bright LA sun, they were all fine, fine, fine.

 _Years ago, Edwin’s older sister had come up with a saying about that word, “Fine.” “When someone says that they’re ‘fine,’ Eddie, what they really mean is that they’re_ frantic, insecure, neurotic, or emotional. _” He never mentioned that, either._

The truth was, no one in that mansion really liked to sleep… though they were really closer to _afraid_ to sleep. Afraid to close their eyes and become vulnerable – either to whatever or whoever might sneak onto the grounds and into their rooms, or to the nightmares that sprang up behind their eyelids.

Howard and Jason were the lucky ones. They could stay in the lab and keep working until they wore themselves out to the point of falling asleep at their desks and over their latest projects.

Peggy, and Daniel, whenever he stayed over, pretended that they at least wanted to keep a decent sleeping schedule. Nobody pointed out that all that really meant half the time was that they did SSR paperwork in Peggy’s bedroom until they got drowsy enough to crawl into bed and hold each other, relaxing into each other’s presence until it felt like they could face the possibility of nightmares together.

Edwin and Ana at least managed to _actually_ keep a decent sleeping schedule – or at least the appearance of one. No one heard, or would, in fact, have even _guessed_ the number of nights that they had woken one another from night terrors, Edwin shaking as he relived the reverberations of explosions from dropping bombs, or Ana lashing wildly out at the imagined Nazis who’s guns she had only barely escaped. They dug their nails into their palms until their spouse took their hands, and buried their faces in one another’s shoulders, screaming or sobbing in heartbreaking silence. They’d been this way before, when they’d first come to America, and after Ana’s encounter with Whitney Frost, the worst of at least Ana’s shellshock came back with a vengeance.

But still, for a while they could pretend that they were fine, fine, fine – and of all the people on the planet, it was Jack Thompson who messed that up. Well, Jack Thompson and, arguably, the combined insistence of Peggy and Daniel, seeing as they were the ones who convinced him to move into Howard’s mansion while he recovered well enough to go back to New York.

Because, as it turned out, Jack’s coping mechanism for nightmares – which he had, of course, lately been plagued with – was not to cling to a person or his work. Instead, he had a longstanding habit of going in search of a glass of whiskey or ten. As many as it took to put him out for the night; he never really bothered with counting the number.

He had scoped out Howard’s alcohol cabinet – extensive, and honestly impressive as it was – earlier in the day for exactly this purpose the first day he was at the mansion. It was the one venture he had forced himself to take during the day, despite the fog of medication and pain that he still felt he was slowly battling his way through. The day’s fog would sharpen into a night of inescapable memories, though, if he didn’t find a way to numb it, he knew, so he gathered his intel – and predictably found himself going to put it to use at about one in the morning.

He just didn’t think he could bear to see that masked shooter in his dreams one more time tonight, so he’d gotten up and slowly, painfully made his way into the sitting room, which had a full bar installed, wonderful man that Howard Stark was. What he _hadn’t_ counted on was the other occupants of the house.

He could hear Stark rattling around in his lab even this early in the morning, and he knew that Daniel wasn’t actually here tonight. However, he’d only been in the sitting room for about thirty seconds before he heard someone cock a gun from the doorway, and he froze like a deer in headlights, his back to the person and his heart hammering with one hand resting on the cabinet door. Which was depressingly locked, anyway. He shouldn’t go scouting things out while drugged, as he apparently missed important details.

“Who’s there?” the gunman snapped – in a crisp British accent that made Jack want to melt with relief that he wasn’t _about_ to show on his face.

“It’s _me_ , Marge!” he snapped savagely, turning towards her as rapidly as his aching body would let him.

“What in the blue blazes are you doing?!” Peggy asked, eyes wide as she shoved her gun back into it’s… _was that a **garter**?_

He gestured behind himself to the cabinet, wincing slightly when the gesture pulled at his shoulder. “Looking for a drink!” 

Peggy frowned at him before saying dryly, “The amount of alcohol behind that glass is worth what I make in a year; it’s under lock and key, of course.”

“And who’s got the key?”

Her eyes narrowed ever so slightly in the darkness. “Mr. Jarvis.”

_Just his luck. He was going to be doing this entire stint at Stark’s place sober, wasn’t he?_

“Jack, you need to be in bed,” Peggy declared simply, gesturing him forward like he was a kid that needed corralling. “Come on.”

“I can find my own way back,” he informed her in a dull growl.

She watched him for another silent moment before apparently giving him a mental shrug and turning to go back to her bed, leaving him to drag himself back to his room – just as someone switched on a lamp in the hall outside. “Miss Carter?” a soft voice asked in a whispered pitch.

Though Jack couldn’t see either woman yet as he moved slowly forward, he heard Peggy answer, “Ana, what are you doing up?”

“I heard someone moving about, not in the lab. I thought…”

“Nothing to worry about,” Peggy assured her as Jack finally caught sight of the woman Peggy was talking to.

_Ana. Why did he know that name?_

Over Peggy’s shoulder, the redhead saw him only a split second after he saw her. Realizing that the two had made eye-contact, Peggy added onto her explanation, “Chief Thompson was just looking for a way to slake his thirst.”

Ana – _who was she, who was she? Stupid drugs, making his brain useless –_ glanced behind Jack, as if seeing through the wall that separated the hall from the sitting room, to where the bar was. He got the unsettling feeling that she knew exactly what he’d wanted to “slake his thirst” with. Yet she offered softly, directly to him, “I could bring you a glass of water from the kitchen, if you’d like.”

“No, thanks. I’m fine now,” he answered, hoping he didn’t sound as awkward as he felt – because he felt very much like a kid who’d gotten his hand caught in the cookie jar.

If he couldn’t have his bourbon, or at least a whiskey, then he wanted to go back to bed so didn’t have to deal with feeling so _dizzy_. As if she’d read his mind, Peggy decreed firmly, “We were just going back to bed.” A little softer – _quite a bit_ softer then she had been with Jack – she added, “And you should too, Ana. Mr. Jarvis won’t be happy if he realizes you’re up.”

Ana – _oh yeah, Ana **Jarvis** , _Jack remembered slowly – smiled with wry fondness, informing Peggy, “Mr. Jarvis could sleep through a tornado.”

“Well,” Peggy smiled in return. “Back to bed anyway – with all of us.”


	2. Chapter 2

She was being absolutely honest, Ana reflected, returning to bed. Her husband had developed the ability to sleep through next to anything. It was something of a learned necessity, what with Mr. Stark pattering around in the labs at all hours sometimes, she understood that. For Edwin’s sake, she didn’t even mind it.

It was just that he slept _so_ soundly, most of the time it meant that he didn’t wake at her nightmares until she’d been dragged too deeply into them and become verbal or violent even in her sleep. She didn’t blame him for sleeping – of course not, what a ridiculous notion – but she knew he felt bad about it even so. So she had developed something of a different coping mechanism for when he didn’t wake up, and sometimes she used it when he did but fell asleep again before she could – if she even went back to sleep at all, that was.

Laying flat on her back in bed and staring up at the ceiling – she wasn’t quite ready to curl into Edwin and try to go back to sleep just yet – Ana was pretty sure that Jack Thompson had been attempting to implement the same coping mechanism she used. Going down to the sitting room and curling up on the couch with a glass of whiskey. At least she had the benefit of being able to borrow the key to the liquor cabinet from the bedside table drawer where Edwin deposited it every night. That was what had stopped the chief in his tracks, she decided.

_Well, that and the appearance of an armed-and-ready-to-shoot Peggy Carter._

Edwin mumbled nothing in particular beside her, more asleep then awake as he draped an arm over her waist and asked blearily, “Where were you?”

_Now he woke._

“In the sitting room. Chief Thompson was causing enough of a stir to wake me, I’m afraid.”

She ignored his scoff of distaste at the mention of the chief. One of these days, she was going to get him to tell her why he so disliked the man.

Edwin did not say that every little sound throughout the house had the potential to wake her. Long-honed habits from Hungary, much as she despised and relied on them as frequently as ever these days, were incredibly hard to break. After the recent incident with Ms. Frost, she wasn’t even _willing_ to try yet, and Edwin, bless him, seemed to have resigned himself to her wanderings and skittishness and her setbacks in general.

Ana hadn’t felt so… so tightly-strung, so afraid, so untrusting, so _wary_ and _broken_ in nearly five years, even if it almost never showed on her face when others might see it. But as he had done years ago and as he did right now, Edwin pulled her even closer to him and tucked her beneath his chin so that her ear rested against his steady heartbeat. Tonight it was enough, and she fell back asleep while a plan floated near the blurring edges of her consciousness.

* * *

He was going to break into that cabinet if it killed him, Jack decided resolutely, stepping much more lightly into the sitting room the next time the earliest morning hours rolled around. Given that Carter could pop up with her gun again, it just might kill him, actually.

It might be worth it if he could get some of that top-shelf bourbon in him first, though.

He went straight for the cabinet, stepping on silent feet even if the necessary control of movement was harder than it was normally. They were still keeping him thoroughly drugged up – mostly thanks to Jarvis, who was possibly the most unwilling, stifling nanny on the planet – and antihistamine wasn’t something that Jack could shrug off easily. If only his sleep could be dream-free.

He wasn’t proud of the fact that he’d stolen bobby pins from Carter’s room while no one had been watching him – for once – but he was in front of the cabinet once again, fully prepared to jimmy the lock anyway, when a soft, flatly calm voice, accented but clear, cut through the stillness.

“Please don’t. I’d hate for you to scuff or scratch something; Mr. Stark is very proud of his bar.”

He swore, whipping towards the voice on the settee – he didn’t recognize it as easily as he had Carter’s – faster than was wise. The room spun, and he planted his palms against the counter of the bar, taking a deep breath and closing his eyes until he stopped feeling like he was falling sideways.

When he opened his eyes, the other woman from last night – _foggy brain,_ work _, what was her name?_ – Ana Jarvis was still sitting on the settee, staring at him through the darkness, though he couldn’t tell what she was thinking thanks to the terrible lighting. He didn’t really care about her thoughts, however, thanks to the fact that she was holding something out to him. A tumbler.

Stepping closer, barely caring about the answer, he asked her, “What’s that?”

Apparently satisfied that he wasn’t going to keel over right there in front of her, an exhausted smirk played at the edges of her mouth as she answered, “Four hundred dollar whiskey.”

“Six-hundred dollar whiskey would be better,” he muttered. But he didn’t even think about not accepting what he was being offered. She didn’t bother to respond.

This close to her, he noticed that she held a tumbler of her own in her other hand while she sat sideways and cross-legged on the settee – _how tiny she was if she could do that comfortably?_ – with her back to the open air. Repressed ghosts danced with the weariness behind her eyes.

“You were waiting for me,” he realized aloud, brain catching up with the fact after he said it.

“I was afraid you might damage the cabinet,” she repeated what she’d said a moment ago.

Feeling inexplicably guilty, he tucked Carter’s bobby pins into the pocket of his robe.

“You should sit down,” she informed him in that same lilting, quiet voice. “Before you fall.”

This was too weird, the setting too intimate and soft, and she was a stranger – this was the first even semi-real conversation they’d ever had – but he was still too seeped in nightmares and pain killers and need for the alcohol to care. He settled himself carefully onto the settee too, not even an inch of space between their backs as he stretched his legs out in front of him along the length of the rest of the seat. At least this way they didn’t have to look at one another.


	3. Chapter 3

He took a long drink of the whiskey – it was wonderful, even if it wasn’t the most expensive thing in that cabinet – before he scoffed lightly in the darkness and asked in a dark tone despite his joking words, “You come here often?”

She didn’t answer, but her shoulder blades barely brushed against his back and retreated again as she released a deep, quiet sigh.

 _Oh._ Jack finished his whiskey in silence that she seemed perfectly content with. There was a story to her, he suddenly got the feeling, but it was plain that neither one of them had the energy for conversation right now.

Since his arrival, he hadn’t been outside of his room much at all, but he’d heard different people going this way and that throughout the house, and he’d learned to distinguish who was who pretty quickly. Stark talked too fast, Carter’s and Sousa’s voices were recognizable anyway, Jarvis’s voice was accented, and Dr. Wilkes’s was not.  Yet, if anyone in the house had a distinctive voice, it was Ana Jarvis. He’d heard her talk as often as he’d heard her laugh – soft and rich and lilting.

She sounded different tonight – “quiet” instead of “soft,” “weighted” instead of “rich,” “tired” instead of “lilting.” And he knew that, despite her claim to be here for him, he’d seen nightmares behind her eyes too. She did have her own glass of whiskey, after all.

“Can I get a refill?” he asked, ripping their blanket of silence off of the moment.

She paused a moment, considering the question that he hadn’t actually meant as a question, before she replied, “No. I already locked the cabinet.”

“Then _un_ lock it.” She wouldn’t need light to hear the eye-roll in his tone.

“No.” He could almost feel her stifle a tired sigh. “What you’ve already had will be enough to blur the edges, and you can go back to sleep. I’m not going to let you get drunk, not when you can already barely stand.”

“That’s an exaggeration.”

“No more tonight,” she insisted, but there was a barely-there-then-gone edge to her voice that made Jack all the more sure she had her own reasons for being in here tonight.

In which case, he wasn’t going to be dumb enough to push her, no matter how much he wanted to. On a normal day, he could’ve just at least considered finding a way to wrestle the key from her – and it wouldn’t even be much of a fight, really – but he was not exactly up to his normal physicality yet. He had nothing to do but go back to bed already. That didn’t mean he had to be happy about it, though.

He shoved off of the couch, stupidly too irritated to do it as slowly as he ought have, and only then did he notice that she’d been slowly nursing her drink, not knocking it back like he had his.

Though she was watching him from her periphery, from underneath the red waves of hair that fell nearly to the middle of her back, she didn’t properly look at him as he moved to head back to his room. “Same time, same place tomorrow?” he tossed over his shoulder as he left.

She didn’t say anything, but he knew what the answer was anyway. When you had the look in your eye that she had, you couldn’t just switch it on and off. She’d be there.

* * *

It was probably not a good idea to be thinking about another man’s wife when that man was apparently your primary caretaker, Jack mused, but he couldn’t help it. He thought he’d found a mystery in Ana Jarvis, and it wasn’t as if Carter and Sousa were letting him take a look at any real case files while he was still in recovery mode.

Who _was_ she? Where had she come from? _He couldn’t even remember what the file he’d looked at ages ago had said about that._ And, most importantly, what drove her to a variation of the midnight drinking that he had become so bleakly fond of?

She had seemed so very different last night then she had every other time he’d even heard her speak, let alone been in the same room with her. But then… he got that, didn’t he? Saving face until you were alone. But… he supposed his surprise was because of the fact that she hadn’t seemed _anything_ like the type of person who would need to do that. Maybe that was why he was… well, kind of intrigued.

She was more – or should he say _less_? – than what she appeared to be, and until he had a _real_ case to contend with, he would settle for trying to puzzle out the woman who he apparently needed to get his nightly glass of alcohol. And maybe, if he was lucky, he would even figure out a way to get her to give him more than one measly glass at a time.

_One could always hope, right?_

Then came the even better thought – _wasn’t it wonderful what he chose to hope for in this world?_

Giving it a mental shrug, he decided that he was bored and curious and she had alcohol. Didn’t that make this a good enough idea? It wasn’t like he had anything to lose at this point.

* * *

She was waiting for him again as he slowly, carefully made his way into the living room, almost on the dot of midnight. “You do sleep occasionally, don’t you?” he asked dryly, accepting the glass she held out to him. She was sitting exactly the same way she had last night, so he did the same, all but sprawling out on the settee back to back with her.

“Occasionally, yes,” she answered, honesty and sarcasm mingling strangely in her vacant tone. “Mostly I wait for Edwin to sleep, then slip down here, get a drink, and _then_ try going back to bed.”

“Sounds like a good plan.”

She snorted softly, declaring flatly, “I hate it.”

Jack nodded, though she wouldn’t be able to see the movement. For a moment the only sound in the room was the soft clink of ice in her glass as she sipped her drink, and the noise seemed loud in the quiet. Then he found himself admitting softly, “I get that.” And, strangely enough, he found that he _did_.

“And yet here you are again,” she whispered.

He sighed. “Here I am again.” Silence descended, and he knew enough to sip slowly at his drink this time. After a minute, he asked with a darkly sarcastic edge to his voice, “So, what brings you here, Mrs. Jarvis?”


	4. Chapter 4

“What brings me here tonight?” she asked with a sad little chuckle. “The Danube, actually.”

“You mean the river in Europe?” After a moment, he admitted, “I… don’t understand.”

“My people…” She let out another breath, took a long drink of her whiskey – he hadn’t even bothered to ask about the specifics of it tonight – and continued softly. “In Budapest…”

 _Budapest. She was from Budapest, Hungary,_ he remembered then.

“A few years ago, in 1944 and 1945, Arrow Cross militiamen… made a habit of,” she hesitated, drew in a deep, shaky breath, and that made Jack hesitant too. He’d never seen her upset, really – the night before was the closest he’d ever come to it – and he knew very well that he was no good with emotional women. But she didn’t seem to be _emotional_ , exactly; it was almost closer to detached… or at least she was _trying_ to remain detached from what she was telling him. “They rounded up Jews and lined them up at the edge of the river, where they… shot them in the back so that they would fall into the river and be swept away. Now—Now that I know what it is to be shot… I dream of it, of still being there, in Budapest, being shot in the back, being shot into the river. Sometimes I die because of the bullet, sometimes I drown… but I always die.”

He was stunned speechless, with no idea what to say. He couldn’t imagine such a thing going through her head. No wonder she didn’t sleep well; it was stuff like that that made a person afraid to close their eyes at night, let alone actually sleep and risk the nightmare coming all over again.

It was things like that that drove a person to drink.

“I have not been in a body of water bigger than a bathtub in over a year and a half,” she whispered, as much to herself as to him, it sounded like.

Dragging himself out of his thoughts, he understood something for the first time – something that had somehow escaped his notice all this time. Ana Jarvis was a Jew… from Europe. There were more nightmares in her head than he had ever thought there might be, weren’t there? He strained to remember what year Jarvis’s file said he had married – it suddenly felt vitally important – but his medication and the alcohol were doing their jobs, and instead he found himself asking something stupid instead.

“What about getting into the swimming pool out back?”

Ana sighed softly, and he felt the soft brush of her hair against his shoulders as she shook her head. “I’ve never gotten in it.”

“You should,” he suggested automatically.

She made a huffy noise of disapproval, and was silent for another good five minutes. Then came the painful, soft remark, “My _apu_ and older brother taught me how to swim nearly before I could walk. I used to love it.”

“Then maybe you should try it again, just in Stark’s pool or something.”

“Why do you care?” she asked, and he was surprised by the lack of bite to words that he would’ve expected to come out harshly.

He shrugged, wincing when his shoulder pulled predictably. “I don’t, really; it just seems like the… better thing to do.”

“I don’t understand. ‘Better’?”

“Don’t let those Arrow Cross guys control what you do.” He drained the last sip from his glass, then said, “The war’s over, right?”

She stood, took his tumbler from him, and moved to put their glasses in the sink. So softly he almost didn’t hear her – and maybe she hadn’t meant for him to – she said, “Sometimes it does not feel like it.”

He went back to bed without letting on that he’d even heard her.

* * *

He actually beat her to the living room the next night. It was only a little after midnight, but Stark could still be heard rattling around in his lab, and Jack had to wonder for a moment if the man ever slept. Probably he did; possibly it was only primarily after a glass or two of bourbon.

_Hey, look at that – he had something in common with a millionaire._

It was earlier, Jack knew, then when he and Ana normally found themselves together in here, but he just hadn’t been able to sleep for more than a few minutes a little over an hour ago – _the white walls of the hospital and hotel had blurred together in his mind with a dirty, bloodied white flag, and he’d woken up nauseous_. He’d eventually given up on trying to sleep on his own, and had come down here instead.

Yet, early as it was by the standard of the last two nights, Ana came into the room within less than five minutes.

“You’re a light sleeper, aren’t you? Are you one of those people that hear every movement in the house?” he asked.

Ana nodded as she went to unlock the cabinet, but didn’t yet say a word. She seemed a little… wary of him tonight – _or was it this morning?_ – though he couldn’t figure out why. As she handed him his nightly glass of whiskey and settled into her spot back-to-back with him, she said on a dry sigh, “Your turn. ‘What brings you here tonight, Chief Thompson?”

In his mind’s eye, he saw that white flag laying in a hole as he tossed the first handful of dirt over it, he felt a ghost pain of the bullet lodging in his shoulder. He took a swig of his whiskey.

Then he took a deep breath and told himself he could safely tell her about that nightmarish night that had won him a Navy Cross. She was a good woman, if apparently somewhat troubled, and he could trust her if he chose to.

His whiskey was long gone by the time he was through with his story, but he just stayed on the settee, his head thrown back so that it touched her head as he let his eyes drift closed. The room was dark; there was a possibility he wouldn’t have been able to see the look in her eyes anyway if either of them moved, but he didn’t want to take that chance.

There was a moment of silence that seemed to Jack to stretch on for an hour before she told him softly, “We’ve all done things that we aren’t proud of.”


	5. Chapter 5

He snorted at the sheer understatement of that in relation to what he’d just told her, asking sharply, “Have you ever _killed_ someone, Mrs. Jarvis?”

“No.” She sighed. “But I love many people who have. That is… war – the nature of war. People die, sometimes innocent people.”

“And the fact that that’s just _how it is_ ,” Jack demanded, “That’s supposed to make it better for the guys who are left alive? ‘Innocents died, oh well’?”

“No,” she scoffed softly. “I am not telling you that you were right. I’m saying that to err is human, but war makes people do inhumane – in _human_ – things. You are alive – alive _still_ – and that must be for a reason. Be careful not to live so much in the past that you hinder your future.” She paused before adding, “But I do not think that you are that type of man.”

“No.” It was his turn to scoff. “I’m not.” His ambitions for the future had gotten him in trouble more than anything else recently. “Are you?”

“I… don’t believe so. They would not want me to be.”

“Who’s ‘they?’”

She hesitated before saying softer than ever, “My family. In the months before I left Budapest, we all lived together; we were very close. My _anya_ , my siblings, my sister- and brother-in-law, my nieces and nephews, and me. They were so full of life; they would want me to live, not to miss them so much… so I live.”

The one word that came to Jack’s mind was _“brave.”_ Ana Jarvis was proving to be unexpectedly brave the more he learned about her, and he wondered if she knew that. Jarvis had probably told her so; Jack certainly didn’t know how to.

After another moment of thick silence, she said in a slightly lighter tone, “You remind me of my older brother, in some ways. The war made him…” She shook her head, as if she was still trying to figure out the right adjectives. “Angry, and bitter. He felt hopeless, I think. But he was also the one who most strongly urged me to go with Edwin. I would like to think that for a moment I gave him a little hope.”

They were suddenly very off the topic of the story he’d just told her, and Jack was more than happy to keep it that way as he offered after an uncertain pause on his part, “I’m sure you did. In such dark times, people can find hope in even the smallest of things.” _Well,_ other _people seemed to be able to, in any case._ “I’m sure for a guy facing the idea that his entire family was going to—” He caught himself just in time to keep from being too crass. “Pass on, it must’ve been a relief – and a ray of hope, if you wanna think of it like that – to think that part of his family would continue on with you.”

Ana released a breath, and Jack couldn’t quite decipher if it was a sigh, a snort, or something in between. Somehow, he got the feeling that the most heartfelt remark he’d known to make had still been the wrong thing to say.

She practically confirmed this when she stood so quickly he nearly fell backwards onto the couch. Swiping his glass from his hand, she kept her back to him as she moved to put them in their place for the evening. “Good night, Chief Thompson,” she said hurriedly, making her way towards the doorway.

“Good night,” he repeated on instinct, feeling a bit in a daze as he watched her go. _What in the world? Had he said something that terrible?!_ He certainly didn’t think so, but it was a sharp reminder to him that he didn’t know her as well as these oddly intimate, secluded moments would suggest – and it all made his stomach clench as he realized that he’d just willingly entrusted his darkest secret to her

She stopped in the doorway, a hand coming to rest on the doorjamb as if she had to remind herself to stay put for a second. It was as if she could read his thoughts as she turned her head, if not her body, to the side so that she was halfway facing him as she said quietly, “I’m glad you felt you could tell me that story. I know it wasn’t easy for you – those things never are – and I promise you I’m not the type to reveal your secrets.”

Jack closed his eyes in the darkness again, told himself that he believed her – he was pretty sure he truly did – and released a breath that he hoped would loosen the knot in his stomach a little more than her words already had. “Thanks.”

“Of course.”

And then she was gone out the door and out of sight – a cloud of red hair and a swirl of silken dressing gown – leaving an unexpected aura of quiet sadness in the room behind her. _Or, maybe,_ Jack mused, _that was just the state of his own head these days… but misery really was easier to bear with company._

* * *

When he met her in the moonlit room again, Jack realized why she had seemed so… uncomfortable the night before. It was how he felt now. Exposed and awkward and vulnerable – like he had revealed entirely too much to exactly the wrong person… and yet he trusted her – in general, surprisingly, but also to keep her word and to keep his secret.

Now he wondered if he dared to try and ask what had made her practically flee the night before.

He was standing beside the liquor cabinet when she came in – well, leaning against it while remaining on his feet, in any case; Jarvis still refused to let him cut off the painkillers cold turkey, and Jack didn’t always feel entirely steady on his feet. Ana eyed him a little curiously as she unlocked the goods, and Jack put his hand just above hers on the cabinet door when she went to open it. She stared at him then, still mostly curious, but a little sharpness in her gaze now as she waited wordlessly for an explanation.

It struck Jack then, odd fact that it was, that they hadn’t actually _looked_ at one another – or even locked eyes – very often at _all_ during these times that they’d talked.

He smiled at her, and she blinked like she was surprised by the gesture as he requested, “Let me pour the drinks tonight?”


	6. Chapter 6

She really _was_ suspicious now, but it still floored Jack when she conversationally asked with only slightly narrowed eyes, “Do you want to poison me?”

“Why the hell would I wanna—” Jack bit his tongue too late, realizing what he’d said, and started to apologize. “Sorry I didn’t mean to swear in f—”

Her withering, and _completely_ unimpressed look shut him up before the sentence could even be completed. She released her hold on the cabinet door, gestured for him to do with its contents as he wished.

 _She was a very strange woman, Ana Jarvis,_ he thought not at all for the first time, and half the time he had no idea what to do with her or how to take their interactions.

“You are truly a sailor,” she pointed out. “By now I expect nothing less from you, or the vast majority of people who served in any capacity.” Her gaze never left his hands as he stretched to reach a bottle on the top shelf – probably a good thing; Jack hoped it kept her from noticing the way his shoulder pulled and he winced with the mostly-dulled, still-noticeable pain of it. “Believe me,” she informed him as he poured into two glasses more than what she normally would. “I’ve had much worse shouted directly at me – in the middle of a public street, no less.”

Jack winced, handed her the tumbler he’d poured for her as her gaze darted to the floor, out the window – anywhere so that she didn’t have to look at him.

 _That_ , he realized what he should’ve already seen, _was why they didn’t really look at each other_. Because an expression could be kept neutral, but the eyes were much harder to keep from telling the truth, and the things that had been discussed thus far in this room were hard and raw and painful, ugly, ugly ghosts to see floating in the eyes of another. So they just didn’t look at one another. All the better to keep up the guise that this was normal, all the better to keep up the barriers that seemed to bounce up and down between them.

And _that_ was why Jack had wanted to pour the alcohol tonight, sleazy as even he could admit that was when he was talking about Ana Jarvis. Marge would kill him for this, and Jarvis would happily help her bury the body, but he had his reasons, and it wasn’t as if he had even the slightest intention of hurting her. He just wanted to loosen her tongue a bit more than it usually was.

But he hadn’t thought this through at all, he realized as they settled into their usual positions on the couch. She _always_ sipped her drink slowly, which rather defeated his purpose, he supposed, but he decided to try a different tack, letting the silence stretch on and on between them instead. It was quiet enough in the entire house, though, that he was pretty sure he was the only one who felt the silence was even slightly awkward.

“Don’t wanna talk tonight?” he asked at last, keeping his tone light and conversational, even though the words were practically whispered.

 _Seriously, did the genius still working in his lab_ ever _sleep?_

“No,” she responded just as lightly. “Not really.”

_He was either going to have to get straight to the point, or not get an intel at all, wasn’t he?_

He sighed, considered the way the ice sparked as moonlight danced off of it. “Okay, you win.” _And you wouldn’t, just for the record, if I wasn’t so out of it from these stupid meds._ He didn’t bother saying that aloud; it wouldn’t have helped his case if he had. “I get the feeling I said something last night that…” _That what? That had scared her, ticked her off? That he should apologize for?_ None of those felt like the proper answer, so he left that sentence hanging, asked instead, “What was it?” He waited, giving her what he felt was more than enough time to collect her thoughts for an answer. When she gave him none, he pointed out – though he wasn’t sure why he cared, and that was probably the only reason he wasn’t actually irritated with her already – “Come on, I told you my deepest, darkest secret; now it’s your turn. What you have to say can’t be any worse than what I said last night, can it?”

“No,” she hesitated before admitting, “But it is more personal, and probably, you would think, trivial.”

“Tell me anyway,” he requested lightly, pretending he didn’t hear the heaviness seeping into her tone.

She sighed, but then began to oblige him. “You said last night that my family would be carried on through me.” He heard the rattle of ice in her tumbler, wondered if, for the first time, she had finished her drink before he had his. “That is, in fact, not true – not going to happen, not _possible_ , thanks to the bullet from Miss Frost.”

Her tone was all at once factual and fierce, but he thought that maybe she was trying to be delicate about something regardless. Unfortunately, he just wasn’t understanding what that was. He admitted as much when she said nothing more. “Blame the meds, but I don’t… understand.”

“I can’t have children, Jack,” she said concisely, and once again it was an abrupt statement of fact with a thread of something in her tone that she couldn’t quite disguise. _Sadness_ , he recognized the emotion now.

Too late he thought to wonder if he, being the one still on… at least more pain medication than she was by now, might not be the one to suffer an even worse bout of fuzzy brain than she would thanks to the more liberal amount of extremely hard alcohol he’d poured.

“I’m sorry, Ana,” he offered, returning her use of his first name for hers.

_“Sorry” was good; “sorry” was what people said in these sorts of situations, right?_

She broke the rules, then, the one that he’d figured out just a little bit ago. She twisted around in her seat until she was looking him in the eyes – he hadn’t even realized he was leaning on her until he nearly fell backwards again. He saw the tears sparkling in her eyes – the moonlight sparked off the moisture there the same way it had the ice in his tumbler – despite the stiff clench of her jaw; she saw the way he was struggling to understand why this was _such_ a big problem, struggling to find the right words to say to her.

She smiled sadly, and the crinkling at the corners of her eyes caused a tear to slip out and slide down each cheek. “Yes,” she whispered. “We really are, aren’t we?”

She stood up, put her own empty glass on the counter, and walked out just as suddenly as she had the night before.

Distantly, Jack got the impression that he had just screwed something up – once more – and he didn’t mean the fact that she was quite likely never going to let him pour any of their drinks ever again. He swallowed what remained of the liquor in his tumbler, then crunched on the ice in the glass, letting the sharp cold clear his head a little as he looked out the window from where he sat. Even more of a study, he thought privately, was why it didn’t actually bother him anymore that Ana was in control of all of the so-called “important” – alcohol-consuming – then what was taking its place?


End file.
